I was doing some chart work recently, and it reminded me I have the data for a year of goatse’ing people, along with pre-goatse logging as well. I decided it was time to run the numbers. Here’s some charts:

The Goatse switch-out happened on January 1st, so we can see an immediate change in the first chart. 2007-01 happens, and usage drops down massively. At the time this happened, and it got a lot of attention, people said that I’d brought even more pain on myself because it meant now everyone being linked in through all the weblog sites would use more bandwidth. As we can see, this isn’t the case. Myspace wastes galactic amounts of bandwidth; it appears every time many people go to webpages, they reload all the background images, including the Grim Reaper picture I used to have. Once they started ripping it out, even a link-fest from all the discussion websites couldn’t top that generic Myspace rapeage.

Since the usage was so massive before the Goatse’ing, I ran the second chart just to show usage from January of 2007 through to March of 2008. Here, we see a growth and then shrinkage; after people hear about the Goatse thing, it goes up a ton, then starts shrinking rapidly. In both March and May of 2007, about 75,000 people are Goatse’d or request to be Goatse’d.

The third chart goes even more granular than the second, showing the per-day story for being goatse’d. Obviously that massive spike in the beginning was all the weblogs finding out about it a day or two after I did it.

I can also tell you, definitively, that the goatse image was downloaded 703,899 times in 2007. Again, even though that’s an impressive number, the previous Grim Reaper image had been downloaded 2,531,662 times in 2006. Yes, that’s right, two million five hundred thousand times. My goal was to cut down on abuse of that image and I can assure you that it worked.

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